Some have noted that Bill Foster (D-IL), who recently won Dennis Hastert‘s old Congressional seat, is a physicist. But Chris Soghoian has noted something even more awesome – Foster is t3h k-133+ h4XX0r!!!11!!!-i^2!

Foster, a physicist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, surprised many when he won the district. After all, it had been a Republican stronghold for more than twenty years. After being sworn in on Tuesday, Foster has already made his mark, by providing the single vote needed to pass a significant ethics reform bill.

More surprising than the fact that Foster won in a heavily Republican district, more than his public position against telecom immunity, is the fact that Bill Foster is a computer geek.

According to a February article in the Chicago Tribune, Bill Foster has got coding skills:

The Democrat, Bill Foster of Geneva, is a get-out-the-vote geek. He’s a knock-on-doors nerd who wrote the software program credited with propelling Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy to a narrow victory in 2006 … “It was pretty remarkable,” said Nat Binns, a spokesman for Murphy’s campaign. “He dropped in from nowhere and approached the get-out-the-vote effort as a scientific puzzle.

“He helped us crack the code and figure out where we needed to go and how to do it really efficiently,” Binns said. “It was brilliant. We were able to knock on 140,000 doors on Election Day, which was a big part of why we won (by just 1,518 votes).”

Foster’s unofficial title was “campaign physicist.”

Foster worked as a researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for 22 years. One of his main projects involved the design of equipment and data analysis software for the lab’s high energy particle collision detector.

However …

As for the Congressman’s laptop? He owns a Dell that runs Windows.

Which makes me feel somewhat better about caving and buying an HP Vista machine after all. I understand this is a shallow decision, but the hardware specs on even a modestly-priced one are like something out of a science fiction movie, and if Vista really sucks as much as promise, it seems like Ubuntu is less of a nightmare than Red Hat c.1998 was.

Because you were dying to know.

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